Peter Zafonte

I want bitcoin to be for everyone. Still, anyone who owns it, whether they hold it themselves or leave it on an exchange, should understand the risks and responsibilities that come with it. In July, Coinkite disclosed that a firmware bug in some Coldcard hardware wallets had weakened the randomness behind the seeds they generated, and attackers recreated private keys from those seeds. In October, Ledger reported that criminals had opened genuine Ledger devices, added hidden components that captured recovery phrases during setup, and put them back on sale. This week, Binance paused withdrawals after attackers drained its hot wallets. ...

kernel-node is an experimental full node built on libbitcoinkernel, which packages Bitcoin Core’s consensus and storage code as a library with a C API. It validates blocks but doesn’t serve them to other nodes. It syncs from several peers at once, and most of its design is about the download path. Two things in kernel-node’s block-processing thread show the central constraint of programming against libbitcoinkernel. First, when the node submits a block, it ignores the return value: ...